What a month! Between the launch of our new flagship TrueNAS storage line, the release of FreeNAS 9.2.1.6, and an overhaul of the FreeNAS training classes, we’ve been quite busy. Keep reading to see what we’ve been up to.

Cheers,The FreeNAS Team

Introducing: The *NEW* TrueNAS Unified Storage Appliance

After a company-wide effort from the team that brings you FreeNAS, we are proud to unveil the new line of TrueNAS storage appliances.

Unified. Scalable. Flexible. The TrueNAS unified storage appliance is storage power, flexibility, and simplicity combined: high-availability, high-performance, feature-rich storage for a variety of business applications. With SAN and NAS in one appliance, as well as a wide variety of services and protocols, TrueNAS covers every use case. Whether it’s an offsite replication target for business continuity, backing
storage for mission-critical VMs or shared storage for video editing, TrueNAS provides a reliable, fast, and easy-to-manage solution.

The new modular TrueNAS hardware platform allows TrueNAS to grow with your needs. Upgrade from non-HA to HA or from one performance tier to the next by simply swapping or adding controllers. With TrueNAS’ Self-Healing filesystem, you can be sure that corrupted data never makes it to disk and any corruption that’s detected will be corrected in the next disk scrub. TrueNAS intelligently optimizes storage capacity through an adaptive compression algorithm that maximizes storage efficiency while
reducing I/O latency. Our rigorous burn-in process is designed to ensure all drives that leave our Silicon Valley headquarters work as intended when they arrive at your facility.

If you’re looking for an enterprise storage solution, why not send us a quote request? TrueNAS is the only storage platform built and supported by the developers of FreeNAS. Every purchase of a system helps supports the development of FreeNAS, allowing us to add more features to the software. If you love using FreeNAS at home, you’ll love
using
the new TrueNAS at work.

FREE Intro to FreeNAS Classes

We’re proud to open our FREE Intro to FreeNAS classes to the general public. Software educator, Linda Kateley, will be covering the same topics as the full-length class including web UI, setup, volumes, and datasets but the sessions will be much shorter. We’ve incorporated your suggestions from the exclusive trial run last month and will continue to make edits to the class based on feedback you leave
us.

Due to the overwhelming response, we’ve also decided to lift the daily attendee limit on each class. So tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell anyone who you think would benefit from these classes and sign up for a quick 1-hour session. Classes will run every day.

For those of you interested in learning more than the basics, you’ll be happy to know that we’re also offering paid, advanced FreeNAS classes. Here’s a list of our current subjects:

FreeNAS Administration

FreeNAS Sharing Deep Dive

FreeNAS Hardware Architecture & Performance Basics

Fault Analysis Workshop

The first class will start on September 3rd and classes will take place every Wednesday. These classes are fully interactive, so attendance is limited to 10-15 people per class, allowing for thorough Q&A with the instructor. We also have three free beta classes scheduled so we can refine the material. For the current schedule and to reserve your spot, check out the site. Make sure to sign up early—with over 6 million
FreeNAS downloads, we expect these spots to fill up fast.

A big thanks to everyone who helped quality check the classes and left us comments! We’re working hard to develop these classes and hope you find these resources useful.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE

It’s finally here — FreeNAS 9.2.1.6 is available for download! All the bugs fixed in this release can be found here. Full release notes can be found here. Some of the key features in this release
include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.9

Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2

A new VirtualBox jail template

Several fixes related to ZFS replication

A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA

VirtualBox template updated to 4.3.12

The FreeNAS development team would like to thank all the testers who provided feedback and bug reports for FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA, 9.2.1.6-RC, and 9.2.1.6-RC2.

New Video Tutorial – Installing and Configuring BTSync

We’ve got another new FreeNAS video tutorial for you. By popular demand, our newest video demonstrates how to install and configure the BitTorrent Sync plugin for FreeNAS.

BTSync is a file synchronization tool that utilizes the peer-to-peer technology BitTorrent is known for. It’s one of our more popular plugins because it allows you to directly share files between your FreeNAS system and other devices. By skipping third-party services, you ensure that your data remains private.

If you found this tutorial helpful, check out our entire YouTube channel for more step-by-step tutorials.

TweakTown Reviews the FreeNAS Mini

If all the other reviews from the past haven’t convinced you about the FreeNAS Mini, maybe this in-depth review from TweakTown will. TweakTown recently pit the Mini against several other popular small office NAS appliances in a series of benchmark tests. As they put it:

“With the cache drive, the Mini breezes through the enterprise workload with ease and makes the other products on our chart look entry-level… The iXsystems FreeNAS Mini has server level performance and custom options at an off-the-shelf-price.”

For more details, check out the article. They’ve included some pretty impressive graphs based on the tests they ran. We won’t give away all the details, but we will say that the FreeNAS Mini won TweakTown’s Best Performance Award.

FreeNAS & Plex on Know How…

You may remember that Know How… previously featured a FreeNAS build tutorial. Our software was recently featured again on Episode 95, this time with a focus on the Plex plugin. After a quick guide on FreeNAS hardware selection, the hosts demonstrated how to install and configure the Plex plugin. Be sure to give it a watch if you’ve been
thinking about setting up your own Plex server at home.

Interview with Brett Davis

This month’s issue of BSD Magazine features an exclusive interview with the VP of iXsystems, Brett Davis. As one of the first iX employees, Brett is a prime person to ask about the early days of iXsystems and the relationship with FreeNAS. The interview also goes into detail about the new TrueNAS product line that was recently released and the qualities that make the company and product stand
out from its competitors. Be sure to check out the article for a behind-the-scenes look at how iXsystems operates.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!

iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, a 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of
FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.

Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Got a FreeNAS hardware build you’re proud of? Come up with a tech tip while tinkering around in the GUI? Have a link or picture you think we should see? As long as it’s not something you wouldn’t send to your boss, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at FNsubmissions@ixsystems.com. We’re always on the lookout for FreeNAS and storage related content to feature in the newsletter and on our social media channels.

Connect with Us

If you need help with your FreeNAS setup or would like to show off your configuration, share your plugins, or just talk with like-minded people, join the conversation on our community forums. For video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.

Well, we said 9.2.1.6 would be the last in the 9.2.1.x series, but CVE-2014-3560 (a possible remote Samba exploit) forced us to change those plans!

While we were at it, we also added a few small performance improvements and brought over a small feature from 9.3, namely the ability to do replication on a direct link without encryption, potentially speeding up replication anywhere from 3-4X (especially over 10GbE). This is generally most useful when doing initial replication to a backup box, while they are co-located together, after which normal encryption can be used in sending the deltas.

Appended are the release notes for 9.2.1.7. We encourage all existing 9.2.1.x users to upgrade. Thanks!